Aptana Studio 1.0 release, updated RadRails, new commercial edition

The Aptana IDE, now renamed as Aptana Studio, is a venture capital backed effort at creating an Eclipse based IDE for Web developers. It has support for many AJAX and Javascript toolkits, Javascript editing and Javascript debugging. Next to that, it also aims to keep up with new trends, as shown by Aptana Studio's support for creating Adobe AIR application or special support for developing AJAX applications on the iPhone.

In the Ruby space, Aptana employs Chris Williams, the long time maintainer of the Ruby Development Tools (RDT). RDT has a long history, and a long list of features. RDT's editor offers all the usual features, such as AutoComplete for methods (using a type inference algorithm developed in a Google Summer of Code project), next to many static analysis checks that point out bad practices in the code at edit time. Next to that, RDT has had debugging support for many years, next to a GUI for unit testing. Aptana also took over development of the popular RadRails, which adds tools for Ruby on Rails development. The latest RadRails update includes a pre-configured JRuby interpreter setup, and more usability features.

A distinguishing feature is the Refactoring support for Ruby. The existence of these automated refactorings answered a long standing question of whether automated refactoring was possible at all in a language like Ruby. Considering the list of working automated refactorings, it seems it's possible (of course, with limitations for very dynamic code).

The release of Aptana Studio 1.0 is the culmination of many years of work. The Aptana IDE has been free to download ever since its inception, which opened up the question about Aptana's business model - after all, the company does have paid employees, and giving away all products doesn't really provide an income stream. Aptana seems to have addressed this in Aptana Studio 1.0 by offering a commercial version. The Community edition is the base of the offering, and remains free of charge. The Professional edition is commercial, and offers a few extrafeatures: